In this Jubilee Year of Hope, Jesuit business education mission collaborators are challenged to engage with students, colleagues, and stakeholders around authentic sources of hope for a better future. Whether in the form of rediscovering “we are capable of recovering a sense of universal fraternity” with the poor or contemplating “the beauty of creation and care for our common home” (Pope Francis, 2022), this year marks a privileged time for reflecting and acting on opportunities for living into our shared mission of journeying with youth toward a hope-filled future (UAP 3) and caring for our common home with Gospel depth (UAP 4) as Jesuit business educators and leaders (The Society of Jesus, 2019).
In light of the “rampant tragedy of poverty” (Pope Francis, 2022) as well as the continued progression of climate change and degradation (IPCC, 2021; IPCC, 2022), this year also marks an important milestone for weighing the sufficiency of our approach as Jesuit business educators to defining and realizing the hope of a better future. Laudable in many regards, many Jesuit Business schools employ approaches grounded in sustainable development and UN’s 17 sustainable development goals. But, in light of our collective progress, is sustainability enough for our students, our colleagues, and our stakeholders for a hope-filled future?
Seeking more robust moral imagination and intention, this essay draws from axiology within ethics to challenge the sufficiency of sustainable development as a foundation for pedagogy and practice in Jesuit business education. Sustainable development faces limitations in its anthropocentric scope of direct moral consideration, its narrow focus on a technical and technological management of ecological crisis, and its moral neutrality in defining a better future (Henning, 2015). As Pope Francis noted, “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress” (Laudato Si, 2015, 194). Moving beyond sustainability, the essay encourages the active use of axiology to exercise moral imagination and purposively define a better future in collaboration with our students, colleagues, and stakeholders.
Building from this, the essay proposes pedagogical and organizational opportunities for employing an emphasis on intentional axiology in ethics as a method supporting a more integrated moral imagination for Jesuit business education. Axiology in action, supported by the Laudato Si Platform’s seven goals (Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, 2025), is proposed as a process for creatively and collaboratively defining a better future with a group of students, colleagues, or stakeholders. Alternative encounters with ethical frameworks such as self-stewardship, voluntary simplicity, and degrowth are encouraged for expanding moral considerations and possibilities. Deep purpose orientation (Blocker, Cannon, & Zhang, 2024) is also discussed in terms of classroom skill building and business school/college adoption for formally and strategically integrating rich, creative axiology-informed ethics into Jesuit business education. Combined, these actions and others inspired by a more integral, integrative definition of a hope-filled future beyond sustainability can animate more transformative teaching and practice for Jesuit business education mission collaborators.